POLICY AND PRACTICE REVIEWS article
Front. Mar. Sci.
Sec. Marine Pollution
Volume 12 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fmars.2025.1615329
This article is part of the Research TopicAdvances in Marine Environmental Protection: Challenges, Solutions and Perspectives Volume IIView all 21 articles
A New Horizon for Rule-making in Global Ocean Governance? Reflections on the IUCN's Contributions and Limitations
Provisionally accepted
- 1China Institute for Marine Affairs, Beijing, China
- 2Greenfield Law Firm, Shenzhen, China
- 3China Rescue and Salvage Institute, Beijing, China
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As traditional risks in global ocean governance continue to deteriorate and new challenges emerge, the state-centered pattern of the international rule-making approach often demonstrates inefficiency and lack of fairness, hindering the achievement of SDG 14 and damaging the common interests of the international community. In this context, the International Union for Conservation of Nature has successfully participated in the development of international legal rules over the past few decades, providing valuable perspectives for improving international rule-making in ocean governance as a non-state actor. However, due to various internal and external factors, the potential of this pattern is still limited. Therefore, to compensate the inherent shortcomings of state-led mechanisms for developing international legal rules, non-state actors including non-governmental organizations and organizations of hybrid nature are encouraged to deeply participate in and even lead the international rule-making in ocean governance, while maintaining their neutrality and representativeness. This paper not only further clarifies the role of non-state actors in environmental and ocean governance, but can also contribute to the study of contemporary development models of the law of the sea.
Keywords: Global ocean governance, international rule-making, International Union for Conservation of Nature I.Introduction, SDG 14, non-state actors
Received: 21 Apr 2025; Accepted: 24 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Chen, Zhong and Zhang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Xidi Chen, China Institute for Marine Affairs, Beijing, China
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